Tag Archives: Cars.com

Post Mortem analysis: Cars.com, Expedia & Record Plc

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A quick “post mortem” on three stocks that I recently exited: Expedia, Cars.com & Record Plc. All three were disappointing in absolute or relative terms and especially in two cases I really made mistakes.

Expedia:

Some days ago, I sold my Expedia shares with a small ~10% profit, although the stock dropped by almost -30% in one day after the Q3 result announcement.

What happened ? Well, Google travel seems to have taken a big dent out of Expedia’s business. I even wrote about Google travel some months ago but didn’t actually do anything. This was my takeaway back then:

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Quick updates: Vostok New Ventures, Majestic Wine and Cars.com

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Another headline for this post could have been “The good, the (not so) bad and the (very) ugly…

Let’s start with “the ugly” right away: Cars.com

Yesterday was a pretty bad day anyway but Cars.com decided that it is a good day to tell investors that a potential sale of the company will not materialize. The whole bidding process has been described in details by the company. In summary, 29 parties looked at the company but no “actionable” bid could be obtained. This alone might not have triggered the -36% share price reaction taht happened yesterday,

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Update Cars.com & Kanam Grundinvest

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Kanam Grundinvest

Kanam Grundinvest was a special situation liquidation investment I made around 2 years ago. After 2 years, the position returned ~13,5% and is therefore on the upper range of my estimated return range from 4-8% p.a.. From the initial purchase price of around 16,17 EUR/unit I received back ~ 9,50 EUR in tax free distributions, resulting in a 2,5% remaining portfolio position.

However the current price of the units at ~8.85 EUR is very close to the intrinsic value of 9,24 EUR. So there is not that much juice left and Warburg will not liquidate super fast as they keep earning their fees as long this vehicle exists.

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Cars.com (CARS) – Interesting spin-off opportunity ?

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!

 

logo-cars

Cars.com is a recent (May 31st) spin-off from publishing company Tegna, which itself is a spin-off of the Gannet publishing Group. Interestingly, Gannet/Tegna only bought control of cars.com in 2014 for a total value of 1,8 bn USD.

Cars.com – The business & Market

Cars.com is a typical “Online classified” business, meaning that it collects offers of merchandise (in this case cars), aggregates and sorts them and then shows it to as many potential customers as possible.

The economic value of such a “service” is relatively easy to explain: For a potential customer, it saves time because he can look at and compare different offers at one place. For the sellers, such a service is basically an advertising and/or sales channel which ideally reaches many potential customers.

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